I feel like I write about roads more than about school these days

So I was all set to write about yesterday morning’s pre-first-day-of-clinical mishap (because my life is a series of anecdotes about mishaps; I’ve yet to have anything notable to say about any of my actual classes except for a couple of amusing quotes from professors) as soon as I got a chance to write anything at all when this past hour happened and dictated that I write this down first before I forget it.

Last night, it snowed. This is something of no consequence to where I live. I live in a place where serious winter weather happens as often as it doesn’t in Florida, and to about that extreme. Between December and February the average outdoor temperature is 9º Fahrenheit. It snows daily. Today when I went outside at 10:15 the large bank thermometer was reading 15º. It snowed about four inches, and to someplace where everything is always open, regardless of the ridiculous blizzard or whatever, I didn’t even think to check my student e-mail before leaving. Who closes a school when there’s only four inches of snow? This is a school that was still going for the first two days into a disastrous ice storm a few years ago that left several entire counties without power and left me fleeing to my parents’ 150 miles south for about four days. (If that identifies my school to you just from that one statement, I’m not actually surprised in the slightest.) It literally had not occurred to me at all that school might be closed. Snow hasn’t equated to “day off” in my head since high school. This college never closes. Snow meant “I have to be ready to leave earlier than usual because I have to sweep snow off my car, isn’t that a pain”. I complained about the having-to-sweep-off-the-car issue, got ready to go and went outside.

The major road I live on was, miraculously, plowed. I’ve had to go to school on days when said road had not been even slightly plowed and today it was mostly clear; this indicated the rest of the drive would be smooth sailing. And it was! Until I got to school, where in trying to turn down the road that led to the parking garage, my car slid up and down a few times in a giant slush-drift. I switched it into the lowest possible gear and rocked back and forth a little bit, discovered there was no way I was getting into the garage as it involved going up a hill that was covered in about 3 inches of dirty snow, attempted to drive around the school on roads that were also not plowed (on school property) and realized that it seemed that the parking lots were not only not plowed (they clearly had smooth, white snow in them) but that the parking lots were entirely empty.

That was when I realized perhaps not checking my e-mail before I left had been a major oversight.

It simply hadn’t occurred to me that the school that is open when no one has plowed the major interstate that 50% of students at least use to get there might have closed when all the highways and expressways were clear.

So I drove all the way around to the main parking lot, which had a few cars in it (likely all maintenance staff, I figured, and later found out I was mostly correct – a couple may have been teachers) and was still basically covered in pristine snow, found a spot I could pull close enough to the building to that I would be able to get Internet signal, pulled out my trusty 9.1″ computer, prayed I would actually get wireless signal and opened my email, propping the computer up against the steering wheel.

Where I found not one but four emails, the first of which was sent at 5:31 am, indicating that the school would be closed until noon because they didn’t have plow service before then (my reaction: what? You’re open when the roads aren’t even plowed yet because you always have plow service). My one class today was scheduled to end at noon. The clock on my car read 10:44.

Putting away the computer, I realized there was no way I was going to be able to easily get out of where I had pulled the car in. Just because that section of the lot had a clear access road didn’t mean the rest of it wasn’t, well, snow. And I had ended up about halfway in the snowdrift created by the plow that cleared the access road. Switching the car between its lowest gear and reverse about five times, slowly rocking back and forth until I could reverse the car and drive in a circle to make it back to the access road, where another car pulled in just as I was trying to pull out, so I had to reverse back into the snowdrift for a second and force my way out of it again.